The Importance of Time in German Culture:

Visitors to Germany will notice the ubiquity of clocks, the consistent posting of opening times and office hours, and other forms of temporal orientation.

In the scheme formulated by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall, Germans form a "low-context," "monochronic" culture.

That means that they take time commitments seriously, do one thing at a time, and concentrate on the job at hand. Hence the saying, "Arbeit ist Arbeit und Schnaps ist Schnaps." North Americans, particularly those of Northern European descent, attach somewhat similar values to time, but Germans carry the attitude further. The contrast can lead to friction when members of the two cultures try to work together.

Promptness is a key virtue: "Fünf Minuten vor der Zeit / Ist die wahre Pünktlichkeit" (Five minutes ahead of time is true punctuality). Tardiness is held to be inconsiderate, even insulting, to those who must wait.

Grammatical Time:

English and German share six basic tenses (the present, simple past, present perfect, past perfect, future, and future perfect), but German has no "progressive tenses": "I am watching you", "She has been visiting her sister", "We had been wanting to leave for a long time", "I will be seeing him next week", etc.

To indicate a continuous action that began in the past and extends to the present, German uses the present tense and a time expression, usually a prepositional phrase with "seit". Often the adverb "schon" emphasizes the duration:

Telling Time (Wie spät ist es?):

Note that when the time is written in numerals only, a period, rather than a colon, normally separates the hours and minutes. Often the "Uhr" is abbreviated as "h": "Es ist 8h 25."

Some Rules for Adverbial Time Phrases:

1) Definite time expressions without prepositions are in the accusative:

2) Indefinite time is in the genitive (as, of course, are time expressions with "während"):